My brother and I spent the better part of last night being impressed with the newly-released Syndicate demo, enjoying ourselves fully in its rather full-featured co-op gameplay.

Co-op games and gameplay has a storied history. In most cases, what’s offered is simply the ability to play the same game with friends. Rarely seen is co-op specific content, to say little of gameplay changes or additions designed specifically for co-op play (beyond reviving downed teammates). Co-op play is usually just single player with two people instead of one.

Sometimes, this makes sense; when you start partitioning your game into co-op and single player segments, you can rest assured that more people are going to experience single player than the co-op. So, if the question comes up as to which part of the game to invest more time in it’s easy to imagine co-op losing out.

That hasn’t stopped the errant game here and there from making a meal of its co-op presentation. Splinter Cell quite uniquely presented its co-op as a marriage of co-operative gameplay and a competitive multiplayer campaign, offering gameplay that included both co-op maneuvers not seen in single player as well as first-person shooter gameplay unique to the entire game — all taking place in custom maps and scenarios designed solely for multiplayer.

That the latest game, Conviction, acts as a major departure from this varied gameplay is worth mentioning. It’s still a fun game to play, owing to Conviction’s overall streamlined stealth action, but you simply aren’t working with your teammate like you did in previous games, just backing each other up in a very simple way, as though two Sam Fishers are mucking about, passing like two stealthy murderous ships in the night. All the same, they apparently found that it wasn’t worth it to dedicate that much development time to the co-op experience (though the game does feature its own co-op campaign, so this might have just been more streamlining). To me, the departure from what they’d done in the past represents an overall shift in how game developers view co-op content.

What strikes me the most is that some of the most bro-tastic co-op games out there today, Gears of War, lacks any form of true co-op function. You simply play with your friends — worthwhile in this day and age, doubly so for the third game which allows up to four friends to bro it through the campaign, but it lacks even Army of Two’s rudimentary co-op maneuvers. That was a game that let you do a number of simple things, like start an in-game countdown for coordinated headshots, drag downed buddies around while they use their sidearm to cover you, mock surrenders, everything solidified your in-game relationship with your partner. Yet Gears co-op is just Gears of War with more players tossed into the mix.

The point in all of this is, co-op is fun, but to actually play with and support your partners is even better. And this is what made Syndicate into a lost night for my brother and I — and this is just the demo. It’s this that makes the game much greater than the sum of its parts.

On paper, the demo is good but fairly standard first-person shooter fare. Each area in the demo is more or less treated as an endurance run where enemies seem to keep attacking for a set amount of time or number of reinforcements. The environments themselves work well for this, providing a number of opportunities to use the game’s vanilla selection of weaponry, from cover to duck behind with assault rifles, to flanking opportunities for shotgunners, to wide vantage points for the sniper in all of us. Aesthetically, this level seemed to match pace with a marriage of the cyberpunk glows of Deus Ex with the clean color palette and geometry of Mirror’s Edge. While it works for the rain-soaked setting it’s easy to complain that we’ve replaced bloom and brown with grey and rain for a level describes as being in China yet with nothing aesthetically Chinese in its execution.

What is unique and well-done here is the mature dystopian cyberpunk setting that doesn’t stray into the heroic post-cyberpunk territory adored by most such games. You are an agent working to advance your syndicate, working and killing high above the huddled delusional masses. Something about that appeals to me, in that these levels take place in clean corporate environments while the huddled masses toil about in Bladerunner-esque streets.

Part of what brings this above the standard fare is shared with the single player campaign: DART-6 and breaching. The DART overlay shows you the world of a cheater’s dream, with objects of interest and enemies highlighted in easily-recognizable orange, even though walls. With this, you can easily keep tabs on the fairly smart enemy A.I. as it tries to flank, ambush and generally out-maneuver you. Rush forward or treat this like a standard FPS and they’ll efficiently end your co-op experience; use the amazing amount of data from your DART overlay and you’ll begin to truly feel like the badass super cyber soldier you’re supposed to be as you effortlessly counter their strategies.

Breaching is the game’s “use” button but, in keeping with the setting, you can “use” breachable objects from a distance and while doing any number of other things, while being forced to keep your breach button pressed still keeps you connected to what you’re doing. In the demo, this is represented by opening shortcuts and flanking turrets so you can get close enough to use your breaching software — fun stuff when you’re still fighting off hordes of enemies. This comes in doubly handy when it comes to “rebooting” downed teammates, as it allows you to do so from a minor distance while allowing you to dodge and shoot to defend yourself.

After this are your applications, what might be in other games your spells or other quasi-magical abilities. These can be used to support you and your co-op partners both, through providing damage shields that soak up a noticeable amount of hurt, to damage buffs that add an intimidating red glow to your weaponry as it cuts the amount of ammo needed to down a target by half. Later unlockable abilities include group heals and group ability rechargers, among others. Adding these to the basic ability to heal your teammate (by “breaching” them) at any time as well as the rebooting of downed allies, and my brother and I both really felt like we were contributing to each other’s success.

In addition to that, the game does score everything you do and ties mission completion and “chip-ripping” specific enemies to a fairly complex RPG-like progression; through this, you get basic points that level up your character and unlock new DART upgrades, as well as weapon and application blueprints (for new guns and apps) and upgrade tokens. In-mission the scoring is trotted out as a minor competitive element among players through score comparison, and the end-mission summary lets you know which challenges (kill streaks, team support goals, etc.) that you’ve completed. The whole effect grants both a meaty progression system and a meaty look at your specific progression, which again makes the co-op campaign seemingly more than what is presented, and something you’ll enjoy playing through multiple times to get all of the unlocks.

Overall it’s my impression of the demo that Syndicate provides a slick package with tactical co-op gameplay and plenty of stats to keep yourself busy with. From discussions around the internet, the demo mission is apparently one of the weaker missions at that, so we’re both definitely looking forward to the full nine mission demo campaign (to say nothing of the fun promised by single player). There’s little things to tweak about too, like the very excellent electronica / dubstep soundtrack, comprised of professional DJ remixes of the original games’ tracks, some very fun voice acting at the hands of the four archetypical yet well-designed co-op agents and the variety of online features (like making your own Syndicate, probably like a clan but I’m fuzzy on the details).

Just for fun, I’m going to list a few things that we had to find out the hard way, as the demo does lack a tutorial or a full-fledged “How-To” screen:

• Access grenades by holding the weapon switch button (Y on Xbox).
• Grenades aren’t refilled at ammo boxes; rather, you need to breach (defuse) thrown enemy grenades and pick them up.
• “Boss” weapons don’t get refills at ammo boxes either.
• Tap the DART Overlay button (RB on Xbox) to turn it on; tap again to turn it off. Otherwise, press and hold to keep it on until released.
• Pressing “down” on the d-pad accesses alternate firing modes for some weapons.
• Pressing crouch (B on Xbox) does many things; it slides when you’re running and puts you into cover if you’re near a chest-high wall. It also crouches!
• You can pop out from cover by entering aiming mode (LT on Xbox), or by “walking” at the cover, which pops your character and their gun out for some quick firing.
• Jumping while sprinting (LS on Xbox) offers a unique “long jump” maneuver and animation.
• Jumping over obstacles results in a Mirror’s Edge-esque “vaulting” maneuver.
• Melee (RS) doesn’t do anything unless you’re near an enemy, in which case you perform an “execution.”
• Once you unlock weapon and application upgrades, you need to “research” them to take advantage of the upgrades; they level up just like you do: by performing well in co-op.
• Just as in the full game, there is one “agent” per “account” (gamertag), with no respeccing. Choose those upgrades and researches wisely!

But perhaps most startling is the shift in power and importance. A decade ago, the best games and consoles came from Japan; the idea of a gaming market without Japan was unthinkable.  Today, the United States dominates a gaming market where Japanese publishers just can’t compete with “western” games. This is a world where Japan needs the US much more than the US needs Japan. Let’s look at some statistics from our good friends at VG Chartz!

 *software sales aggregated based upon top 1000 selling games; the Wii has a nominal number of software sales beyond their top 1000 games, but these aren’t included due to laziness and their triviality. All numbers in millions of units sold.

*again, based on top 1000 software sales 

 *for these purposes, a “western” game is made by a developer headquartered in the US or Europe. Eastern games are those headquartered in Japan. Wii is doled out separately for the sake of argument. It’s not a “next gen” console and the vast majority of its top 50 are first party titles.

*This shows how well each region’s games sell in each region.

Now, you might think there are issues with this data. The top 50 games are aggregated based upon the “global” statistic on VG Chartz, which means games with immense success outside of Japan will force big Japanese hits off the list. Fair enough, save for that no Japan-only hit obviously hit hard enough to put a dent in the top 50 anyway. That notwithstanding, the raw software sales sell the story well enough: Japanese game sales, across all three consoles, barely dent US sales, to say less of the aggregated “western” salesphere.

I’m also limiting this to just the standard consoles, no PC games or handhelds. PC stats are hard to collate, as they tend to not include digital downloads (a major, major PC distro channel) and are hard to limit by “generation.” Handhelds likewise cross generations and as with the Wii aren’t really “next gen,” even more so than the Wii.

But the raw data, even if you just limit this in this way, shows that very simply, Japan can’t support the gaming industry like the US currently is. Western developed games outsell Japanese games ten to one. Between the Xbox and the Playstation, only a handful of the top 50 titles are developed in Japan; the rest of the big sellers are made in the US, with some coming from European developers like Ubisoft.

On the flip side, western games don’t tend to sell well in Japan. Not that they need to. There was a time that the Xbox’s meager Japanese market share was cause for concern; now, the situation is just surreal as Japanese developers split their resources, releasing games on the PS3 only in Japan but cross-platform everywhere else.

They do this, because otherwise, they wouldn’t make enough money to survive. Even still, they have to work their asses off to scrape the bottom of the US sales statistics. Part of this is funding — western games tend to have larger budgets than their Japanese brethren — but it’s also a matter of skill, so to speak.

“To be honest, I think that western developers are superior to those in Japan overall,” Platinum’s Atsuchi Inaba has gone on record stating. “We’re fast reaching a stage where it’s going to be about individual developers and not about what country they are in.”

When he goes on to mention globalization, the direction seems to be exclusively towards the west. What country, indeed.

Hideo Kojima agrees with my above sentiment that foreign acceptance isn’t the key to success, but rather, broader international appeal. Western success, he suggests, stems from separating development from Japan, owing in part to the narrow appeal of certain aspects of Japanese culture.

Famously fractious Dead or Alive developer Tomonobu Itagaki adds salt to the wound: “In Japan, they are lacking not just in technology, but the important thing is the creative and ingenuity. [Developers] complain a lot, but they don’t take action.”

Some developers do, but it just takes more than just “turning eyes blue and changing the hair color,” as Capcom’s Keiji Inafune would learn between the bare effort of Shadow of Rome versus the resounding success of Dead Rising, which was tailored specifically to the west. To meet rising needs, Capcom has already begin bringing western development firms in-house for future titles.

He goes on to state that Japanese developers don’t have the social skills to sell themselves or their games. This much is true. Many people have noticed a kind of one-way street kind of attitude where you more or less get what you are given and don’t ask questions. Unfortunately, they’ve bred this into their marketplace, and Japanese gamers simply don’t demand better of their developers like western gamers do.

“Japanese developers tend to work on inspiration, not so much on a set time schedule like Americans,” Resident Evil guru Shinji Mikami has stated.

Expounding on the idea that the problem with the Japanese gaming industry may begin with its fans, Squeenix CEO Yoichi Wada wishes Japanese gamers were more open to western games. Just being a western game gets the discriminatory label “youge” attached to the title. They literally don’t like it because it’s not from Japan.

Of course, there may be more work ahead outside of just convincing Japanese gamers to give the occasional western game a chance. There are cultural sentiments unique to Japan. Some of these are easier to export than others, but they clash entirely with the import of their opposing ideas from the west. Japanese gamers like linear storylines, possibly with branching paths not from moral choices, but arbitrary decisions. Tasks in games should be well-defined and emphasize diligence and skill, rather than creatively forging one’s own path to victory. Worlds are also should be iconic and symbolic, boiling down complex and abstract concepts down to quantifiable values and functions.

So there we’ve described two major exports: JRPGs and fighting games and neither one really hits the sales charts. And in their opposing number, we’ve described a number of smash hit western games, such as Grand Theft Auto, Elder Scrolls, Battlefield/COD and Mass Effect.

Western games strive for “hyperreality“, in presenting a world that reacts to you how you might expect it to react, based upon your actions. Your set list of actions is based upon the scope of the game; you can swing a sword in Skyrim because there are swords in there. It is also very, very important to gamers that, if they swing their sword, the world react. Books should go flying. They should get arrested if it’s a guard or in town.

To Japanese gamers, this is missing something. The Elder Scrolls has always been popular in Japan the same way that visual novels are popular in the west: as in, not very, and you tend to look at such fans as having strange interests. Yet then there’s games like Demon’s Souls, which mimics the idea of an open world yet places heavy, heavy emphasis on memorization and skill in a way distinctly unlike The Elder Scrolls.

At the same time, the Souls series refrains from any overt Japanification. We can all pretend it’s a western game that just happens to be hard. This is why it’s enjoyed its own moderate success, and this openness is why it’s now multi-platform.

Given the market share difference and rising development costs, however, we may soon see a time where Japanese developers have to choose between something that will appeal to Japanese gamers and sell well only in Japan, and a more “global” westernized approach that seems off-note with their own hometown but is successful internationally. Not every game can do both, and the most successful games are western through and through.

I wasn’t originally going to buy Skyrim. At least, not right away; with no pre-order bonuses to trap myself with, and with the dull pain of not just Oblivion, but a year’s worth of buggy letdowns to contend with, not to mention a myriad of other games to play, I had no immediate plans on investing in Skyrim. Wait for the patches and mods, I’d told myself. A few quick “Let’s Play!” videos on youtube later and my brother’s quizzical remark of, “By what insanity am I playing and loving a TES game you don’t even own?” and I’d dropped the sixty bucks on steam to load it up.

(My brother never liked The Elder Scrolls, burning out on their vast open worlds in a matter of hours; yet he was more than twenty hours into Skyrim when he made the recommendation).

And let me just say: Skyrim is the most organic, immersive RPG I’ve played to date, and worth the leap of faith.

By now, you should know that this games begins as all other Elder Scrolls games do, with you in chains and three steps from Destiny kicking in to get you out of jail. Unlike previous games, character creation is divorced from menus or seemingly arcane choices such as birthsign, primary attributes and major and minor skills. Instead, you customize your character’s appearance (with all of the options very easily settling into a fantastic looking character) and set about your quest.

You don’t choose skills or attributes. You use any skill you want, and any time a skill is raised, it contributes to levelling up, during which you can increase your health, magicka or stamina pools, and you can select a perk which further enhances and customizes your abilities. Very broadly do you choose a specialization in the form of a trio of stones representing the signs of the mage, thief and warrior, with each selection earning a remark by your companion at that point. This specialization boosts your rate of progression with skills under that banner, but may also be changed should you choose to revisit that shrine later on.

In other TES games, the myriad of choices locked you firmly into your role, with a good deal of theorycraft ruining your day later on. Mage characters needed to choose a race and birthsign that boosted magicka, as you lacked other means to do so later on; health was determined by your endurance score at character creation and at each level up, making it an artificially high priority over other more “obvious” choices like intelligence for spellcasters.

Now, you proceed through character creation the same way you choose your class and play the rest of the game: by swinging the weapons you want to swing, casting the spells you want to cast, and making the items you want to make.

Progressing through these skills is also much more organic. Rather than incrementing them regardless of context, combat skills can only be raised in combat. No longer do you walk down the boulevard casting a one damage destruction spell on yourself to meagerly become a better mage; instead, more generous advancements are given, but only in combat. Persistent spells such as summons or armor spells are incremented at consistent intervals throughout combat.

All of this creates an experience where I’m not worried about levelling up or my skill selection. I use what I want when I need to, and the game takes care of the rest.

For the interface and UI, I couldn’t be happier. This was actually one of my biggest fears for the PC version, as the radial menus and “quick” select lists looked like something tailored for gamepads, but it adapts to mouse and keyboard very well and its minimalist approach eases the transition from game to menu and back again. Of particular note is the quick menu, populated by items you “favorite” in the main menu and is your primary mode of switching spells and weapons. Even with an ever-growing list in that menu, I’m still in and out in seconds, diminishing how much the menu might draw me out of the action.

In terms of the actual game itself, it’s as though the designers took the top mods from Oblivion and adjusted their vision accordingly. Doors and containers go through an “open” animation when activated (though doors are still triggers for loading screens), and all of the crafting interfaces are accompanied by background animations of your character mulling about forges, alchemy tables and workbenches. You can even cook, though it’s tied to no skill and you don’t actually seem to get “hungry” in-game. Items have no durability, but the smithing skill is raised by “enhancing” existing weapons and armor or crafting new sets. Naturally, ingredients for these are out in the world, where you’ll see a bevy of wildlife interacting with itself (foxes hunting rabbits and so forth). Need leather? Go find relieve some critters of their hides.

Dungeons are likewise very organic and natural seeming. The first one you naturally come across in the story is thrilling, with each section seeming like a real place with roots everywhere underground and furnishings and decorations decayed from age and use. Emaciated zombies and skeletons crawl out of the crypts where they’d been laid to rest and bandits discuss how best to split the loot, rather than using the same dialog from townsfolk, and the number and variety of voice actors really sells this as a real place with real people. There are even traps and puzzles, the former of which you can use to your advantage if you care to.

With all of these elements, I find myself approaching combat carefully, with an eye towards trying new and better tactics and more creatively using all of the weapons and spells at my disposal. I can’t think of the last time an RPG made me do that, to react and carefully consider my actions rather than running forward in a desperate quest for more XP.

When I talk about TES games, I will often tell people that Morrowind felt like home to me. Beneath its starry skies and strange moons was an alien landscape filled with unique and wonderful things to explore, a real world with interesting people and things to do. Oblivion never really matched this, its world seeming to be a theme park crafted in medieval style and lacked a soul for its generic qualities. Skyrim grows on me the more I play and the hours I’m forced to spend away from it doing trivial tasks like eating, working or sleeping seem unfair and cruel to me.

Just as my current playtime barely dents what’s on offer in this game, so too does this review only scratch the surface of what’s new, better and great about Skyrim. Go, play it, and be merry, and if I really can muster the willpower, I’ll probably write more here soon.

Here are some upcoming titles I’m interested in, in no particular order, in a non-exhaustive and only mostly inclusive list:

Amy (XBLA / PSN / PC; TBA 2011): Amy is a downloadable survival-horror title where a disease has ravaged most of mankind, turning most of its victims into monsters. You control a woman named Lana, who is infected with the disease, as she escorts a little girl with the inexplicable ability to suppress and regress the disease in those around her. One of the interesting gameplay concepts is that the disease continues to progress and manifest if you move away from Amy’s area of effect, which can be useful in moving around amongst the monsters (so long as you don’t let it progress too far). Throw in other, less understanding survivors and military personnel and I imagine it’s a fairly tense game that favors an intellectual approach.

Metro 2033: Last Light (360 / PS3 / PC / WiiU; TBA 2012): Dear The Two Or Possibly Three People That Read This Blog: play Metro 2033 right now. Rent it, buy it, whatever. It’s awesome, right? Atmosphere like we’d forgotten games could do? Intriguing concept, well-executed through gameplay and plot (except for the lousy stealth)? THQ has apparently decided that Metro should be a big-name franchise and the next title is most assuredly going to benefit from this. Apparently, this will be a continuation of the bad ending in the first game (yes, there were in fact two endings, good luck getting the good one) and will depart entirely from the book series on which it’s based (only about half of the first game was based on Metro 2033).

Prey 2 (360 / PS3 / PC; March 2012): On paper, Prey 2 is an open-world sci-fi / cyberpunk bounty hunting game with a high emphasis on creative solutions to challenges posed in gameplay (solutions often involving nifty guns and equipment). Also on paper is the fact that we haven’t actually seen much of the game in action, and most of what has people intrigued is the cinematic “gameplay teaser” trailer (which hasn’t burned us AT ALL BEFORE NO SIR). Still, what’s out there shows a game of immense quality and intriguing framework, and it’s the sequel to the little id-tech 4 game that could.

Fighting Game Roundup: Street Fighter X Tekken (360 / PS3; March 2^nd, 2012) is a crossover with two fighting games I’ve moonlighted an interest in, and many of the gameplay concepts — the 2v2 tag format, dual specials, sacrificing your partner for XTREME POWAH and a nice combo and juggle system — mean it’ll hopefully keep my interest alongside Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (360 / PS3; November 15^th, 2011) which needs no introduction (DAT ROSTER). Outside of that, King of Fighters XIII (360 / PS3; November 22^nd, 2011) will likely be my introduction to that most venerated fighting franchise. Then there’s Skullgirls (XBLA / PSN; TBA 2012) which is a gorgeously animated 2D fighter that features a “ratio system” for tag battles, meaning you can choose one, two or three characters, with your power and health inversely proportional to the number you select (with the risk of not taking advantage of tag-only features). Then there’s the Persona 4 Ultimate in Mayonaka Arena (360 / PS3; TBA), a fighting game that features many Persona 3 and Persona 4 characters, with specials including the summoning of their personas. Then there’s Soul Calibur V (360 / PS3; TBA 2012), which should be vastly improved over IV with more combo and juggle centric gameplay and possibly even supers and specials. Lastly is Dead or Alive 5 (360 / PS3; TBA 2012), which is being billed as “fighting entertainment” rather than as a “fighting game.” This means, among other things, that there’s more ability to interact with the stages, causing breakages and meltdowns of geometry as you fight atop exploding skyscrapers and such. I know DOA has never quite been a darling of the pro fighter circuit, but this emphasis seems to embrace the exclusion.

Phew. Tangentially related to the fighting game genre is Anarchy Reigns (360 / PS3; January 2012), ostensibly a beat’em up billed as an action-fighting game, you control one of a slew of incredibly bizarre fighters as they battle each other and other, lesser opponents. Made by the people that brought us Mad World and Bayonetta (and also starring the former’s protagonist, Jack). Honestly, all I really want out of some games are interesting characters, a sense of humor, and the ability to pile drive someone as a close a copy of a transformer as the lawyers will allow.

Saints Row 3 (360 / PC; November 15^th, 2011). Hi Jack! Looking forward to co-opping it up as a reasonable expy of Tank Girl once more. Should note that pre-orders on the THQ store get a free “season pass” that includes three downloadable mission packs valued at twenty bucks.

Dishonored (360 / PSN / PC; TBA 2012) is allegedly going to be an open-world, sandbox first-person stealth action game, lead in part by the minds behind the original Deus Ex, Theif: Deadly Shadows, Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Set in a retro-future industrial steampunky world, you play as supernatural assassin Corvo as he gets his revenge on, lethally or not at the player’s discretion. There’s only been screenshots of this game, no videos, and the devs are “going dark” following their recent interview with Game Informer.

Then there’s Overstrike (360 / PS3; TBA 2012), a semi-serious co-op action title that will try to bring Insomniac Games’ trademark humor in line with their alleged dedication to storytelling. The trailer is whimsical without being ridiculous and each character seems to bring a number of unique weapons and abilities to the team. Again, no actual gameplay footage, so we’ll have to see on this one.

For a quick rundown of honorable mentions, Operation Racoon City looks fun if I really need more co-op zombie killing action, and its saving grace would be the inclusion of the Resident Evil universe. Lollipop Chainsaw is a game I’m somewhat embarrassed to say I’m interested in, but time will tell if I can live with my girlfriend’s incredulous stares as Not Buffy pantyshots her way through hordes of high school undeads. Aliens: Colonial Marines might be a more horror-focused, methodical take on the Alien franchise and probably will be all the better for it, but I was really burned with the latest AvP game and I’m twice shy. I Am Alive is such a quiet game with no real press, coverage or information outside of the fact that it’s survival horror in a destroyed Chicago. Payday: The Heist applies the L4D formula to objective based gameplay and miraculously seems pretty boring despite the interesting concept. Gameplay trailers for Kingdoms of Amalur seem pretty good so far, and Need for Speed: The Run liberally applies story to the typical NFS formula (including at least one Chicago-based map!). Basing its locales on real-world cities and locations seems like a great move for the series.

Dishonorable mention goes to Dark Souls, which apparently will deny you the ability to play the game if it detects you’re in an X-Box Live party. I don’t rage often about games or things like that, but this made me really hate the arrogant pieces of shit designing this game that prevents me from using basic features I’m actually paying money for in an attempt to control how I play with my friends. Well, guess what? I was only going to buy this game to play with my brother, so these guys can go fuck themselves.

Show, don’t tell. It’s probably the most frequent critique in all of fiction, from books to movies to television, and likely the first Rule of Fiction shoved down your throat in a creative writing class. The best writers wonderfully illustrate any number of points, issues and background information through the normal conversations and interactions with their characters; the worst ones present works that are sickeningly didactic and shatter the suspension of disbelief. So believe me when I say that it’s obvious that Gears of War 3 hired and has benefited from having a real writer pen the story.

It’s not that there isn’t a rich, impactful setting to move the characters, though through the series you’d need access to the collector’s edition art books to truly appreciate that. Nor is it that we’re playing as simple soldiers with basic deviations outside the standard archetype; more has been done with far less, I assure you. But at its most basic element, games can show you a great deal and it takes a good writer to use that, rather than relying on the player accepting what they’re told.

In the second game, we’re told that Dom is looking for his wife, the challenge and failure of which makes him alternatively angry circumstance and angry at the locust. When he finally finds his wife, cheap tricks are deployed to tug at our heartstrings, and Dom is left hating the locust even more.

Dissecting this a bit, we never really get much on Dom’s wife or why she’s so important to him. Yes, she’s his wife and that’s probably reason enough to rescue her, but there should be something more there. Were they childhood friends? Was he dating up? Did she give him self-worth? Did she run away from her family to marry him? Would they even still be together if the COG hadn’t Hammer of Dawn’d all the divorce attorneys?

We don’t know. They tell us she’s his wife and he loves her, but shows us nothing. And while I will state with authority that, if you did not cry when he found her, then you have no soul, it accomplished this through some cheap albeit effective tricks that would have granted equal emotionality had he been looking for (say) Tai, or his dog. To what end? In the showing, we see him eschew a stealthy approach to gun down all of the locust bastards that did this to her, which is so much different from the normal hatred he had for the beings that have laid Sera low to begin with, against an enemy we’ve been content to annihilate since the first game.

In short: it accomplished nothing in deepening Dom’s character or humanizing the conflict between the humans and the locust. The developers already did that, very effectively, through the juxtaposition of architectural grandeur and stark destruction, in the attitudes of the Stranded and the state of the COG, and just how desperate everyone seems in general.

Getting into Gears 3 (while I’m sticking to a minor element about an hour into the game, you may wish to avert your eyes for potential spoilers), they already show much more than they tell. The game begins in Marcus’ nightmare, an amalgam scenario from when he went AWOL to rescue his dad. It’s very believable that this event haunts Marcus to this day, a decade later, especially that he was a soldier then as he is now. It’s easy to understand that he’s probably thinking about it every time he fires his iconic lancer, and just as easy to believe that he dreams about it every now and again.

Fiction can fall into the trap of unnaturally having characters unnaturally explain things to each other when there’s no real reason to do so. “As you know,” they might begin, “Your father died when you tried rescuing him, years ago.” To which the character might sarcastically chide them for stating the obvious. In Gears, we see a new message from Adam Fenix, and Anya, both in-character and for our benefit, gasps, “It’s your father!” She doesn’t unnecessarily then state, “You know, the dead one,” and Marcus only gruffly, and appropriately replies, “Yeah, I noticed.” It’s a subtle difference that makes the experience all the better.

But the best example has to be when Cole visits his hometown and old stadium. Everyone recognizes him, which is nice, but when he gets to his locker and sees his old thrashball equipment he begins thinking of (and we see through his eyes) his life before E-Day, the awards, the accolades, how he was branded a hometown hero while playing for the Cougars. He had it all. Then, without breaking from this reverie, he’s called into action to destroy a glowie stalk with a bomb that’s been setup across the field (the stadium now housing some Stranded). In a sepia-toned pseudo-flashback, we see a thrashball-suited Cole use the moves that shot him into fame and fortune to, in slow-motion, grab the “ball” and slap it on the stalk down the field, “scoring” one for the good guys.

It’s a sad moment because you realize that Cole, with his fame and fortune and living the dream, has lost more than most (and yet, lost less). Yet the juxtaposition of his heroics as a gear and his jukes and dives on the field show us that the loss hasn’t destroyed Cole. He’ll take being a hero as a gear with the same charisma and determination as he played at being a hero to his hometown. He shouts “Whoo!” and plays up his bombastic personality because that’s what he’s always done: helped people through tough times by giving them something else, something more. His hometown isn’t unique in its devastation — “The whole world looks like this,” Cole remarks when Baird sarcastically questions whether it’s changed at all — but that response and the flashback gives us greater insight into Cole and why he fights, more than the locust being evil or needing to save the world.

It shows us all of that with a ten minute sequence that begins in a locker room that uses no cheap tricks and stays entirely and believably in-character.

My girlfriend and I don’t share every interest. Since our relationship began, we’ve converged more than diverged in our tastes, but there are (obviously) more than a few areas we don’t see eye to eye upon. Contagion was one such area, where she desperately wanted to see it, singing a sounding chorus of “this is how we’ll die! It’s all real!” while I was much more skeptical that any popular media, much less a motion picture, would take the care and time to get it right.

She calls herself a scientist, while I go by the altogether more accurate “science enthusiast” descriptor. I’m a skeptic and I enjoy reading what science I can digest, particularly regarding health (it’s really fascinating how much utterly fallacious nonsense there is out there). In my readings, I’ve become more than aware as to just how frequently science is misrepresented in the media, and to be honest, the trailers were billing this as a horror-government-thriller thing.

I can tell you it’s not. It’s actually a (more or less) feel good movie about science that actually gets the vast majority of its science right. It doesn’t play up any unnecessary drama — similar to what Laurence Fishburne remarks in the trailer about how the birds are “already [weaponizing the bird flu],” deadly and infectious diseases bring a drama all their own, with the only necessary ingredient being the human condition itself.

Remember Outbreak? That movie had a ton of manufactured drama. Where virologist Dustin Hoffman heads off a government plot to destroy the cure to a ridiculously infectious and deadly hemorrhagic fever just in time to vaccinate his estranged ex-wife (who was already well into dying from the disease)? A movie that featured CDC workers making horrendous mistakes and magically producing blood-based vaccines overnight?

Yeah, this movie doesn’t do that. For that, it does come off as more shallow than its contemporaries, as there is no classical movie villain, twirling his mustache as citizens die in droves; nor are characters really delved into aside from maybe learning a key fact of their personality or in viewing how they handle the breakdown of society given the contagious nature of the disease. Instead, we have a rather factual movie that presents the broader timeline between a scary new disease and its defeat at the hands of SCIENCE!! That’s not to say that the movie doesn’t have moments that tug on your heartstrings, because it does, but those aren’t the point of the movie.

Early on, the CDC has a blunt accusation levied at it, in that its overreaction to H1N1 “scared a lot of healthy people.” This is a key theme in the movie, in that fear is both overriding and yet exists as a binary condition: either people don’t do anything because they’re not afraid, or they’re terrified enough to start looting grocery stores and rioting in clinics. Preparedness for this sort of event is lacking today, and it’s somehow cruel to point this out or urge people to think. It’s a paradox that the CDC has to deal with when it starts disseminating information to the public.

In its own scientifically-minded way the movie does present a kind of anti-science villain in Jude Law’s character. At first he seems to fulfill some kind of cutting-edge reporter archetype, save that he’s a blogger making wild conclusions off of a viral (har har har) video of a man dying on a train in Japan. As the movie progresses, he spins wilder and more fanciful “theories” regarding the origins of the disease and the governments alleged (read: non-existent) vested interest in hiding the cure or propagating the disease. This comes full-circle as he profits massively off of promoting a hoax cure in “Forsythia”, a homeopathic remedy that he claims cured him on his video blog. The rub is that he invested heavily in Forsythia and profits immensely from it as the public begins grasping at whatever presents itself as a cure, while simultaneously decrying the vaccination effort as worse than the disease.

As an anti-science villain, they’re certainly cutting a broad swathe of quackery.

Homeopathy is a “complimentary alternative medicine” (CAM) that alleges that “like treats like” and that water has a “memory” that allows it to gain potency through dilution. So if you are sneezing, a homeopathic doctor might make a solution of one part pepper to thirty parts water, then dilute that a number of times (by taking a drop of that to thirty more parts water again and again). Some homeopathic remedies are diluted dozens or hundreds of times, to a scale that makes it incredibly unlikely that a single molecule of the “active” ingredient remains.

To wit: the degree of dilution is often such that the ratio of water to the original ingredient is greater than the number of particles in the known universe. They are selling water at an aggrandized markup and telling you it will cure what ails you.

(It’s also something between a joke and an easy statement of fact: if something actually works, it’s just called “medicine.” Science doesn’t bother with different names for things just because their origins are in herbs rather than chemicals. That proponents need to call it “alternative” should be clue enough that it’s full of crap and doesn’t work.)

This is where more ignorance and fear come in: as real treatments take time to produce, test, approve and distribute, CAM-based remedies take very little time to disseminate and a fearful public, looking for anything that might work, will eat it up.

Even though it won’t even “might” work. It’s water. And it robs people of precious time and resources and draws attention away, or intentionally discredits, legitimate treatments.

Jude Law plays this “villain” excellently, with my only gripe being that they don’t do enough to really vilify him, to state why what he’s doing is wrong an dangerous, to the lay-audience that is watching the movie. Even I was confused and thought he’d just gotten his hands on some untested treatment, and it wasn’t until later that they uttered “homeopathy” as a descriptor, and even later that they explicitly state that he never had the disease and tried to scam people with fearmongering.

In the meantime, the character scoffs at these accusations, saying that of course their tests don’t show Forsythia to be effective, and of course their tests don’t show that he had the virus, dismissing every scientific fact with wild accusations of being in bed with the drug companies or the secret government people that want to keep secrets and so on.

This is another tactic of quacks and science opponents: that any study that questions their beliefs is invalid either because what they assert can’t be tested — which is nonsense — or that the test itself is invalid because some vague conspiracy makes it so. Nevermind that science is all about peer review and many are the scientists that would throw the shackles of obscurity away to publically point out the flaws or fabrications in a popular report or paper.

He also throws out some very light anti-vaccination propaganda. I imagine the anti-vac movement would be severely a hampered in an outbreak the likes of which we see in Contagion with one in four dying once infected (another fact they gloss over — I’d thought it killed everyone it came in contact with), but it still bears some mention here.

The anti-vaccination movement alleges that, due to the “toxins” in vaccines, or some other factor, that it causes mental illness, most popularly autism in young children. Again, this is sheer nonsense as no scientific study has ever found any correlation whatsoever between vaccination and autism (there was one but it has been so thoroughly discredited that even newscasters don’t let interviewees get away with citing from it).

It’s never revealed whether Jude Law’s character actually buys into the nonsense he preaches about, whether he pretended to be sick to treat himself with a “cure” that he knew was bogus or if he just had the normal flu which went away in due course.

To the layman, health, medicine and your own body are arcane devices that you struggle to make sense of. Every culture of littered with folk remedies, from “feed a cold, starve a fever,” born from the bizarre comparison between our bodies and furnaces, to pushing liquids (which doesn’t do anything inherently outside of preventing “dehydration” and making the patient feel better), to megadosing on vitamin C (which does nothing except cause you to pee out the money you’re wasting in vitamin supplements). Most colds and sicknesses go away in anything from a few days to two weeks with no treatment. Most treatments suppress symptoms, rather than curing the disease. This leads to situations where people will believe that something cured them, just due to the timing, and will relay this anecdotal evidence to others, who feel better about using a friend’s advice and are bolstered by the placebo effect.

Sometimes this is harmless when it stays near just eating healthy and practicing good hygiene. Sometimes this is harmful when it wastes time and resources by encouraging treatments that make extraordinary claims at a premium price. Then it’s downright murderous when they discredit real treatments for whatever reason.

Overall, Contagion was an excellent movie that I had discounted out of hand that I’m happy my girlfriend made me see. Go see it. Don’t be afraid. Learn something.

I love September. It’s the time when summer begins its lazy decline into fall, and oh, the food! Summer blueberries give way to early fall peaches, so full of juice that you have to eat them at the sink; early harvest gourds begin making their way into pastas, curries and sauces and their seeds grant a nutty, earthy taste to pastries and salads. Duck and rabbit find their way into more and more meals, garnished with the season’s berries. It’s a good time of year that makes summer’s passing more sweet than bitter.

Oh, wait. This is a video game blog.September saw and will see the release of several high profile, interesting and as a matter of technicality “unoriginal” titles, among which are the three I’ll discuss today. First off: Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (known to its friends as just Space Marine).

Space Marine technically ranks as unoriginal as it’s a licensed game based off of the Warhammer 40,000 IP, and unjustly labelled as unoriginal with its frequent comparisons to Gears of War as they’re both, ostensibly, third-person shooters with chainsaws and so on and so forth. In implementation, Space Marine is like an old friend or nigh mythical figure returning to you with a strong embrace. I love Warhammer 40k with its “grim dark” setting where humanity is simultaneously so ridiculously beset by so many unthinkably monstrous aliens (xenos), daemons and even other humans that are worse bastards than they, and yet it’s a setting where humanity is so tough it chugs promethium and shits bolter shells. The Imperium of Man is a cyclopean machine whose fires are stoked with thousands of sacrifices and heinous acts to merely stake a claim for survival, and its empire holds untold millions of worlds with untold billions of subjects. Its gothic and baroque attitude and architecture is bizarrely offset by its amalgam of fantasy and science fiction, with grant cathedral ships carrying chainsaw-sword wielding, genetically and surgically engineered warrior monks in powered armor — the Space Marines. And yes, years before Gears would attach a chainsaw bayonet to its machine gun, Warhammer 40,000 saw fit to grant you a nightmare weapon replete with sawing, jagged serrated teeth as a sword — the perfect compliment to your pistol that fires miniature rockets that explode inside of your foes’ flesh. It’s high time this setting got a proper action title.

I’m not usually one tooting around with “badassness” or “kicking ass” being acceptable attributes lacking in other things, but this is basically the setting that kicks ass, and in this setting no one is more badass than a Space Marine, whose new recruits are veterans of hundreds of conflicts across decades of war, and whose veterans have seen more years of war than our planet has seen of civilization.

Space Marine puts you into the boots of the Emperor’s finest and lets you wear them well. The first mission has your avatar going all “dynamic entry” in upper atmosphere, jumping out of his perfectly good ship with naught but a jump pack to take out an ork battle barge by himself. For this task, you get a bolt pistol and a knife. This could probably be considered unfair — to the orks.

These weapons feel powerful. Bolters fire with a profound thunk-thunk-thunk and impacts with a wet spray and a lively thud; death at this weapon’s hand are visceral and chunky affairs thanks to its explosive capabilities. The knife impacts well and your marine will gleefully perform what fans to developer Reclic’s Dawn of War titles will call “sync kills” — special animations where your Space Marine brutally eviscerates his foe in a variety of ways. Kills with the chainsword are family favorites in my house.

And this is the kicker: that “finishing move” is actually your health pickup. Cover is the color of cowards, so there is no “hug walls” mechanic in this game. Naturally, you do take a few hits, and to regain health you must use these special kills. This has a kind of Blood Rayne effect where hordes enemies walk somewhere between fun things to shoot and powerups in and of themselves.

I do mean hordes; ten minutes into the game and I had already unlocked the “100 kills” achievement. The game isn’t shy about throwing dozens of orks at you at once, some closing for melee combat, some hanging back and shooting, and your marine is a match for them all, tearing down their number with an opening bolt-volley and easily closing for melee combat as he charges through their number.

Melee is what will set this game apart from Gears the most, as if the setting and scope were not enough. Your marine can switch to their melee weapon and back to ranged quite easily and the combat feels great either way.

In terms of features, the game is alleged to have a 10+ hour campaign from word of the developer’s mouth, but reviews are stating it’s shorter than that. To pad it out, there is an 8v8 deathmatch in both classic “kill them all” style as well as area control. However, at the time of this writing I had a bit too much difficulty in actually getting into a match. Paired with this will be the co-op survival / arena mode that will be released in October, and both of these tie into the general XP / level based character customization and progression. Customization is a huge aspect to the tabletop, and here you can fully outfit your space marine (or chaos marine) in a stunning number of ways, down to three classes and weapon and perk load outs as well.

So really, it’s a great game for someone like me that enjoys the setting, the attitude and so on. In actuality, I bought the game for its version of a jetpack (a jump pack), which shoots you into the air and, if you so choose, slams you into the ground and your foes if you boost when you land. You get to do this in campaign mode and in the deathmatch modes if you choose the appropriate class. As we all know, there’s a dearth of proper jetpack based gameplay and I’m glad to see Space Marine step up to fill the gap.

Next up is Dead Island. Unoriginal for it being zombies, but great and refreshing for being more akin to Borderlands than Left 4 Dead, with the comparisons to Dead Rising being completely unfair due to just how much freedom you have, with no clocks or anything like that looming over you. Right out of the gate I was wandering in the direct opposite of where my map told me to go, killing zombies and looting everything I could get my hands on.

The game’s ingenious in more than a few ways. You’re one of four immune survivors, so naturally you’re tasked with doing anything the rest of the survivors need. You find weapons everywhere, from broken broom handles to diving knives, though it isn’t as ubiquitous or silly as Dead Rising. There’s a slew of RPG mechanics in the form of leveling up, talent trees and weapon stats, but the dead actually level with you so I’ve yet to encounter a higher level zombie that outclasses me in its prowess at excel spreadsheet.

The game co-ops quite well, with my friends and I piling into a vehicle, beating down zombies or basically wandering about with any number of timewasters in this expansive zombie-infested island. Why is it that the first thing I thought to do was to down a bunch of whiskey and drive my friends off a cliff? I have no idea, but I haven’t had this kind of fun since L4D was first released. I mean, you can actually target and break and sever limbs! Heads open up into ripe mush with a crowbar! Zombies run around on fire, and the fire hurts you! Zombies can drown! It’s great!

But oh man does this game get some demerits due to the sheer incompetence of its developer (or publisher, depending on who is taking the blame). First, I got this on Steam for my PC. A solid choice, my computer murders the graphics and everything runs smoothly. As I was out of town and away from my compy until Wednesday evening, I actually missed the ill effects of the wrong version of the game being released on Steam. Yes, they actually pushed an earlier dev build to customers that barely worked.

Then, co-op is non-functional in-game (we had to use a VPN service called Hamachi to spoof a LAN game over the internet) as the game is apparently way more popular than they accounted for in their modest server setup.

Let me be the first (not really) to kindly say, “You stupid motherfuckers, your game was Steam’s top pre-order for a full month, what the flying fuck did you expect I mean Jesus.”

It’s still awesome though.

Lastly, is the yet-unreleased information-scarcity-defined X-Men: Destiny. Made by Silicon Knights (who need no introduction. The game, however, does. It’s some kind of spiritually successor to X-Men Legends — we think — where you play as one of three new mutants who are placed in the unique position between the Brotherhood and the X-Men as being some kind of arbiter of the destiny of both (we think). You can splice X-Genes towards offensive, defensive and utility powers (we think), creating a unique character that you can continue to customize as you play the game (we think). And your costume somehow plays into this, depending upon which classic character it’s based on.

We think.

Honestly, for a game coming out in three weeks I know next to nothing outside of the fact that I would like for it to be good.

Writing is also hard because it’s deceptive. There are actually many different specialties in writing: literary writing, fiction, non-fiction, journalism for print, journalism for television, critical evaluation and so on. Proficiency in one does not necessarily impart competency in another. No truer is this particular story told than in game journalism.

Game journalism is a tricky industry. Far more than any other special interest publication sector, it shares such a symbiotic relationship with its industry. Game journalists aren’t passive spectators in the reading or viewing of a piece; they actively play the games they review, relaying both a travelogue of their own experience while maintaining an alleged demeanor of objectivity in their critique.

(Notwithstanding, I actually disagree with the idea that reviewers should purport to objectivity, but that’s a column for next week perhaps).

So that’s like, three schools of writing, right off the bat. More when you consider that they’re trying to give us a comparison to other, similar products while evaluating the story and its technical prowess. Honestly now. This is just getting ridiculous.

So it’s not surprising that a few important pieces get knocked out and they forget some of the concepts they might have learned in a literature class or creative writing workshop (if they had such lessons at all). So you see quite a bit of games being denigrated for not having “likeable” characters while they glaze over how un-dynamic the characters are or how generous the writers seem to be with their simple, hated foes. We’re told that a character is badass like it’s supposed to mean something and don’t even get me started on female characters.

Likeability and Believability

Writing is hard because we’re all the Mary Sues of our lives. We want to be liked and aren’t as aware of our flaws as we should be as enlightened, self-aware adults. This is reflected when a game writer creates a product for mass consumption, and is part of our expectations when we leap into the boots of our game protagonist du jour. Games are sold on the prowess of their protagonists, what they can do filling in bullet points on the back of the box, rather than on their limitations or how they (don’t) overcome them. Our immersion is reliant on our seamless transition, the smooth ride into a likeable character and a jarring moment of character-defining dickery can pull us out just as easily as a game-breaking bug.

Trust me when I say this: likeability isn’t as important as believability, although they’re not mutually exclusive by any means.

But what is believability (he asks to himself)? A number of details contribute to whether you’d describe a character as believable, but being grounded in reality is not among them. Whether the story purports to tell the story outside our windows or in the deepest recess of our imagination, people are still people with attitudes, thoughts and desires that should make some kind of sense no matter the setting. The most important trait is consistency, as showcased by writing that allows the characters to be challenged and show us what they’re really like. This one difficult to fully wrap one’s mind around. In simplistic stories, such as Gears of War, the characters are never challenged in a fashion where this is tested; rather, they fight their inhuman mustache-twirling locust with no great challenges to their ethos or drive. Dom hates the locust and loves his wife; they kill his wife — shoved her in a fridge, really — and he continues hating them and loving his wife. Nothing’s changed. And nothing should change: the locust aren’t people to reason with and Dom couldn’t have prevented the entire debacle by, say, being a farmer. So he gets off easy. He’s consistent but he has no reason not to be.

Consistency is difficult to pull off when you’re married to a concept and not a character. Sunshine shows a marvelous example in Chris Evans’ character Mace. Mace is an engineer with a military background: he solves practical problems and he’s pretty disciplined about it, moreso than the rest of the crew. He and Robert, the scientist-guru behind the sun-starting machine, frequently exchange words — angry words — over their differences in approach and demeanor. For much of the movie, it would be easy to write him off as the stupid hard-ass military guy. Yet, when the survival of the mission is at stake, he’s quick to selflessly dismiss his own survival in favor of the much more mission critical Robert. This might seem like a turnabout, but it’s not: he was just singularly dedicated to the mission, what with the stakes being the survival of Earth. Good writing allowed his ethos to be challenged and we got a much more well-rounded and interesting character for it.

Secondly, characters should be affected by their experiences. Max Payne 2 wonderfully focuses on just what kind of person Max would turn out to be with a mobster kill-count in the quadruple digits. In the first game he was incidental; in the second, due to his experiences and how he and other characters react to this, he’s pivotal. Max Payne 2 could not have starred any other character in the telling of Max’s story. Because every character acknowledges what happened in the first game, our actions in the second have great weight: we can easily believe they are happening to Max and the stakes seem all the higher.

Lara Croft is blithely unaffected by her experiences. Delving into tombs and going toe-to-toe with all manner of supernatural foes has zero emotional or intellectual impact. The revelation of the truth behind her parents’ deaths fazes her for but a moment. That her longtime confidant was murdered shortly before her mansion burnt down only compels her onward without a shred of guilt, anger or thirst for justice. She’s not a believable person. She’s rich, smart and strong willed but little else other than seemingly perfect.

Key to their experience is the enemies they face. In fiction, conflict may be focused around any number of concepts, abstract and tangible. A man must face his own fear, a woman faces social injustice, children face bullies and so on. Conflict in games is always much more centered around physical entities and organizations that threaten the existence of our protagonists; the answer to this is violence and external triumph, rather than internal realization or change.

So in a sense, game writers cheapen their characters when they allow them to face naught but faceless, blatantly evil constructs that are only occasionally human.

Martian Successor Nadesico plays with this idea. At first, Earth is under attack by the Jovian “lizards.” Near the end of the series, it’s revealed that this was just an evil moniker as no one knew what they looked like. As it turns out, the Jovians were a lost colony of humans with bizarre cultural values that happened upon some advanced technology. Their culture was based on the heroics of a television show that the main cast was familiar. So they understood their enemy, knew they were human, knew that they were flawed and came out of the experience shaken.

In Persona 3, while shadows seem to be the bread and butter enemy, their nature and tendencies within their arcana cause the cast to discuss, somewhat endlessly, some of the ramifications of their actions. When their situation is revealed to be not as simple as they once thought, they are all forced to come to terms with what they’ve done and now must face.

Kane and Lynch is commonly derided for its unlikeable protagonists. While the series is far from perfect from a graphical, technical or gameplay-based standpoint both my brother and I find their characters compelling. They are not nice people, not likeable people and they can barely stand each other. Yet, within the confines of the game’s plot, each one knows how much he can trust the other, and sometimes even that idea is wrong. It’s a compelling game where the characters — mass murders and violent criminals both — aren’t minced into heroic sociopathy. They aren’t Salem and Rios of Army of Two, happily fist-bumping after their morning mass-murder, nor are they generously given a moustache-twirling foe as in Gears. Why it should be an issue that bad people aren’t likeable is beyond me. The enemies are humans, after all, and the game doesn’t let them get away with that fact by making heroes out of them.

Many of these concerns are cast aside so long as a character is badass enough. Has no one realized that being badass in a video game is far from unique? The shelves are littered with titles starring protagonists with loads of powers, who trump all conflicts set before them. There is a struggle to win, but it is also a foregone conclusion with little triumph at the end. Halo’s Master Chief is probably king of this with the prowess of Spartans being well documented at this point. Not dwelled on (in the games at least) is that they are child soldiers with innumerable cruelties inflicted upon them in the name of humanity’s security. All MC is, is a badass. Once the fighting stops, you can start feeling bad for the guy because he’ll have nothing left to live for (outside of “being lucky”).

The above causes some problems (though the transitive property of lousy writing) to female protagonists. The majority of women in games are written so poorly that it seems a cold comfort to have yet another ridiculous specimen whose only saving grace is that she “kicks ass.” Everyone kicks ass. Strength of character isn’t a physical stat. This is especially sad once you consider that, even among the poorly written males, women still take the cake. So let’s go over some advice for writing women.

When I was a wee lad and took my slew of writing courses, someone made the mistake of saying they were writing a female character. This lead to a lengthy class discussion on “how” to write female characters, what traits you had to include, which ones you couldn’t, and so on. What we came away with — and indeed, the whole point as orchestrated by my professor — was that there are no character or personality traits required by or unique to men or women. None. So her answer to this question? Write the character based on how their experiences, goals, motivations and so on would shape them. The moment you’re including something like “sensitivity” or “vulnerability” or “emotionality” just because they’re a woman (or “emotionally distant” “paternal” or “testosterone-driven” for men), and not because of who they are, well… same thing as letting the plot railroad the characters (instead of the other way around).

It’s not that men and women aren’t different — they are. But this is more an issue of gender, society and norms; not traditional video game topics by any means. So in the meantime, training wheel mode enabled means just stop thinking about it and just write something worthwhile.

I’ll split the difference between editing the first post and adding little tid-bits here and there. There’s certainly quite a bit to talk about, even at the glacial pace through which I progress through the game and I find myself taking it just slow enough to soak in the atmosphere. Reading emails, thumbing through e-books, pouring over e-newspapers and overhearing fascinating bits of dialog — that’s all Deus Ex, through and through.

And boy do I mean glacial. Of the game’s proffered idiosyncratic difficulty levels — Tell Me a Story, Give Me Some Action and (drumroll) Give Me Deus Ex — I of course chose the hardest one, which means more planning and more retrying. While I’m sure more augmentations later on might change this, but early in the game, and at this difficulty level, it’s a black tie affair (and by black tie, I mean stealth is utterly required to live). A few shots and the way-augmented Jensen goes down so the best way to take care of baddies is one at a time or not at all. I also imagine they’re spotting me easier, making the whole thing feel much more high stakes and really, really forcing me to be methodical rather than just assuming I can wing it if things go south (I can’t).

So, minor spoilers ahead. Some of this has been retreaded in every discussion about the game as it takes place during the prologue, but some bits are afterwards and I wouldn’t want to anger anyone. This covers up to the police station in the first chapter (Detroit).

The purpose of the prologue is obviously to titillate. Hints are dropped regarding Sarif Industries’ precarious political situation, the cut throat nature of the augmentation industry and how dependent they are on the goodwill of their governmental and military contracts. So things are good and bad for SI. High risk. Things are changing.

Adam Jensen is an ex-SWAT commander that left the force over a debacle in Mexicantown, apparently involving the directive (and execution) to take out a fifteen year old perp, albeit an augmented one. As it’s remarked that the police have moved from “protect and serve” to “protect and serve the corporate interest,” the whole affair leaves a sour taste in Jensen’s mouth and he resigns, only to take up as the chief of security at SI. In the intervening two years, he becomes romantically involved with one of the project leads, the bona-fide augment genius Megan, who in the game’s introduction tells us that she is on to something big, something revolutionary. Fields of science will be founded on this discovery, industries will rise, the world will quake: big stuff. This is short lived, however, as an attack by some heavily-augmented and extremely skilled mercenaries take out her labs and research, severely wounding Jensen in the process. Flash forward six months and he’s been rebuilt and is slowly getting used to his augmentations and the idea that he had little say in the matter. Is he angry at his lack of agency in this, or in that some mercenary group forced this hand? That’s for the player to decide. But so far it’s a slick, cyberpunk world that’s slowing falling into dystopia with what little hope there is being hotly contested by nearly every party.

Established so far is quite a bit of intrigue. The glory days of SI are seemingly behind it, with ever-mounting public and governmental scrutiny tolling it’s death knell. This is reflected in the city itself: as one would imagine, the biggest augmentation firm with huge government contracts coming to Detroit would likely be hailed as a great thing by the locals, but obviously things didn’t work out and many promises weren’t kept. What they did instead is polarize the city along social, economic and political lines as the divisive, expensive nature of augmentations divvied up the populace into “haves” and “have nots.” Some are poor because they have augmentations, some are poor and should have augmentations, some can’t stand the sight of an aug. It’s a complex place.

What is also being drip-fed to the player are elements that become absolutely vital to the future of Deus Ex. While the progression of implants is seen in each game — cybernetic “mechanical” implants in HR, nano-augmentation in the original and bio-mods in Invisible War — the most startling revelation is that genetics are the key to the whole thing. Some people get along well, even great, with implants, while most others reject them without constant doses of neuropozine (n-po on the streets), which helps in a supposed build up of glial tissue around augmentations.

It should be noted that normal anti-rejection drugs for organ transplants are immunosuppressants; it’s theorized that n-po is a form of local anti-coagulant. Bleeding, apparently, continues in the implanted area, causing the body to try to “heal” it and thus creates scar tissue as a normal mechanism in the healing process. Except, this doesn’t make sense: glial tissue is part of the central nervous system, and its scar-tissue components (astrocytes) only deal with damage to the central nervous system. Not something you’d see building up due to bleeding around an implant location. The idea that you’d need some type of anti-rejection drug for implants makes sense, but the explanation is full of wonky medical science. Especially given the next part.

Genetics become very, very important in the augmented world of Deus Ex. It’s what makes JC Denton, his brother Paul and Invisible War‘s Alex so special. It’s what makes the ending of Invisible War work, as one of the options is to massively modify the entirety of humanity to be genetically compatible with augments. So the idea that genetics are somehow responsible for scar tissue not building up or bleeding at implant sites not being an issue …well, it sounds kind of odd to me. Would have made more sense if they just used some kind “neural feedback” excuse that is not present in those with the right genes. But ah well. Genes are still the big issue outside of even social and economic concerns. So really, it truly is a game of “haves” and “have nots,” and an irreconcilable one at this point of their technology.

What’s telling about this is that Megan was not only on to the genetic key, but the way she did so was questionable in some way. Of course, finding this out as Adam Jensen, rebuilt super-augmented security chief of the future that everyone down in the LIMB clinic is surprised to see not in dire need of any neuropozine …well, this becomes slightly more obvious. Would that it be that she (or Sarif himself) didn’t orchestrate the entire attack just to have an excuse to borg up Jensen and prove the hypothesis. But we’ll see.

This is a future where the dream of a trans humanist revolution has been locked away from the majority of humanity by a genetic key. What should have been a benefit for all is a burden to most. What does this mean? As far as commentary is concerned, it does go hand-in-hand with existant concerns regarding splitting the population around this issue. It being more hardwired than economics or elective choice, well, maybe that’s the point. Jensen doesn’t choose to be augmented. We don’t choose our genes. There’s a message in that, somewhere.

 You’ll hear both trans humanism and post humanism bandied about almost interchangeably; they’re not the same thing, though they cover the same concept and ideologies. Generally, on these topics, there’s a specific question that’s asked: that is, “If you replace part of a human with something artificial, are they less human?” To proponents (and myself) the answer is no. With this comes the realization that no matter how much of the body’s anthropic biological constructs are replaced, the remaining, indelible component — humanity — remains undiminished.

That said, trans humanism represents a transitional phase, where the human form is being transitioned away from; biomimetic (read: cybernetic) augmentations and replacements place you on the path of becoming “robotic” or an artificial person. Once you are no longer “human” in any classical sense, you have become post human. Think along the lines of placing your consciousness into a utility fog or other distinctly non-human constructs.

The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human. — B. John Naisbitt & Patricia Aburdene, Megatrends 2000

Ideally, the departure from the human form should serve to underline the inherent commonality in the human condition; race and gender become true choices and discrimination would matter less than the specific merits, values and morality of the sapient, sentient sophont inhabiting whatever chassis happens to be chic that day.

Deus Ex presents a world where, simultaneously, augments are commonplace and and accepted, due to celebrity adoption, healing those with limb loss, and encouragement (and subsidy) by the government for the populace to accept augmentation (especially where it encourages disabled veterans to enroll for free augmentation installation). The turning point comes when Antoin Thisdale actually sues to electively augment his normal, healthy limbs as he sees employment opportunities favor the augmented; rather than drafting a bill against this form of discrimination, we instead see they make legal elective augmentation.

This leads to a culture of designer augmentation, with citizens paying out of pocket for expensive procedures with financially crippling upkeep; the rich become smarter, faster and stronger while the middle class is obliterated straight down to junky status, blind and crippled as their elective augments are rejected by their biological bodies. This is the part where the authors behind this game have created a situation that impedes the post-human movement with an artificial (pardon the pun) limitation and this is where I’m less comfortable with the message being presented.

Now, this is a very real fear and in general the tone does work towards presenting the idea of a “human revolution,” something to fear, to rebel against, to fight for one’s very survival. Interesting fiction has dealt with how society will handle this elective evolution when there are those that would op out.

Which brings me to a glaringly horrid point made in a few of the ARGs: that this man-controlled evolution is somehow against God’s plan.

Think about that for a moment. When, in Deus Ex, did evolution become part of God’s plan? The idea of a religion opposing it on “moral” grounds seems normal, though I would expect more rhetoric about the sanctity of the supposed divinely-inspired human form, rather than interrupting “God’s plan” for our evolution. The purity of the human form does play into one of the game’s terrorist groups, Purity First, but it is mixed with the evolution-God contradiction. So not so good.

It should be noted that Deus Ex is largely a post-cyberpunk work. Cyberpunk in that the themes being explored deal with the marginalization of the individual — most ingeniously played with Adam Jensen’s resurrection at the hands of his employer — as well as how overbearing megacorporations and globalization diminish culture and government. The “post” part comes from the departure from classic cyberpunk. In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and the many works it inspired, flawed individuals at society’s periphery make a living at the expense of the flaws inherent in a massively technological, corporate-run world. By comparison, post-cyberpunk characters are cut from the same cloth but instead work to better society in some way. And in each Deus Ex title, the player has been presented with the consequences for their actions in how they will impact the world, for better or worse.

Given that it is also a conspiracy thriller, it’s almost a given that we can’t trust Sarif Industries, despite the immense good it has done for medicine and improved the welfare of veterans and those affected by certain disabilities. This is almost certainly true of the intense competition in the augmentation marketplace, with lucrative military contracts waiting for those just ruthless enough to grab them. Enter men like Jensen, apparently granted full freedom in dispatching intruders as the security chief of SI.

It’s not clear yet where these many questions will end up by the plot’s resolution — whence goes augmentation, its benefits to mankind, the essence of humanity and the defining characteristic of being human — but this game is, in fact, a prequel to the original Deus Ex, which takes place five minutes before the end of the world, and the franchise on the whole is capped by Invisible War, which is five minutes before humanity’s rebirth.